Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 2:34:53 PM
I've been reading at my work station today, and many of the articles I've read so far have dealt with with really stupid ideas (lefty, naturally) held by people who are supposed to be really smart. A perfect example is the International Panel on Climate Change, which shared a
Nobel Prize with Al Gore in 2007. (Roll that sentence around on your tongue for a moment. Shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore. Anyone who can do
that without embarrassment is dead to shame.) One wonders how people with so many credentials and degrees can believe that a thin sliver of a benign gas in the atmosphere can cause catastrophic global warming, but variations on solar activity have a lesser if any effect. Where does the earth gets its heat from again?
Wherever you look in the leftist manual of beliefs, you find the same sort of brain-destroying "logic". They believe that taking money out of the economy to pay people for not working makes the economy grow (I refuse to use the ugly phrase "grow the economy"), but allowing job creators to keep and invest more of the money
they have earned doesn't help to do so. They are perpetually baffled by crime rates which decrease when prison populations increase, even though anyone with a clear mind would at once detect that the reason is that criminals who are incarcerated (or executed) don't commit more crimes (unless their lawyer is
Lynne Stewart, and she's not taking new clients right now). They believe that (non-existent) global warming is a national defense concern, but border security is not. They believe that illegal aliens and detained terrorists have Constitutional rights, even though the preamble to the Constitution begins "We the People of the United States", and not "We the People
in the United States". They also cannot discern the difference between Constitutional rights and legal rights. (Hey, libs. "Constitutional rights" means rights
guaranteed by the Constitution. What so difficult about that?)
And so on, seemingly ad infinitum.
I trace the problem to the promiscuous distribution of college degrees. It used to be that getting admitted to college was far tougher than it is now. Before Affirmative Action, grants which are based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other non-academic criterion, ethnic quotas (express or secret), "soft" courses of study (Women's Studies, "Q*eer" Studies, Chicano Studies, and so on), etc., you had to be able in most cases to demonstrate some ability to do advanced work to be admitted to what were still then "institutions of higher learning". Of course, there were so-called "legacy" admissions, but they were always a thin sliver of the college population. Athletic scholarships existed, too, of course, and were often abused, but they're a constant in this equation, so we'll set them aside. More and more, we hear and read that a college degree is essential if you are to prosper in today's fast-paced and technological world.
It never seems to occur to the propounders of this theory that the degree ought to be earned.
Actually, for some of us, the problem could be spotted during its years of development. We knew that achievement in K-12 schools was falling drastically, and yet, thanks to rampant grade inflation and the proliferation of "soft" majors and "soft" courses, college GPAs were rising. How could the same students who were causing the former be causing the latter just a year or four (or more!) later?
In the current administration, we see the phenomenon in its most dangerous form. We have a bunch of over-credentialed, under-educated, under-experienced egotists, only 8% of whom have experience in the private sector running or even working for some kind of private-sector business, are trying to run a great country and everything and everyone in it. People with true self-awareness know that this is impossible, and it's a disastrous mistake to even try it, but these people think they're brilliant, because no-one whom they respect has ever told them anything else. If they had worked and competed in the real world, where failure is punished, they would know better, but they don't.
God save a nation that is run by such over-credentialed, unwise, megalmaniacal fools.